Tag Archives: food

You might think that the life of a blogger is a non-stop series of sexy, celebrity-attended parties, a virtual whirlwind of drug and alcohol-fueled insanity that even famed raconteur Hunter S. Thompson might call excessive. And you’d be right about that. Nevertheless, sometimes we are called upon to do actual work, and be “responsible”. And there has been a lot of that nonsense lately, which not only makes it hard to find the time and energy to write a blog post, but also tends to make life a little tedious…which, in turn, causes tempers to flare, motivation to dwindle, and attitudes and moods to turn to crap. This time of year doesn’t help, either. Winter shouldn’t even be a thing; the only thing that winter accomplishes is to make you appreciate summer a little more, which is a pretty substantial accomplishment considering summer also really, really sucks. Really. Sucks. And don’t trust anyone who tries to tell you that it doesn’t. (The views of Jarrod are not necessarily those of HesseLane or its subsidiaries).

But all is not lost. Even though life, work, the very seasons of the planet upon which we live may all be trying to to rip out your soul, crumple it up and cram it into the nearest rubbish bin, you can still maintain your insanity by taking a more whimsical approach to the nightmarish hellscape we’re forced from birth to navigate and finding things to be amused by. For example, I don’t really enjoy working; not just my job in particular, but ANY job. In general, I can think of many, many thousands of things I’d rather be doing than working. What I need is for someone to just send me large sums of money every so often, with no expectation that I’m ever going to provide any service to them in exchange for it. Yeah, that’s what I need.

But until someone sees fit to do that, I have to work. And since I do, it’s pretty helpful that I work with Shauna. Not only do we work together, but he have practically the same schedules. Sometimes that isn’t a good thing (more on that never). Usually it IS a good thing, and here’s why: we make each other laugh. I’m one of those people who is constantly finding things amusing but rarely laughs out loud. If I had a nickel for everytime I’ve typed “lol” and actually lol’d, I’d have, oh, about zero dollars and zero cents. However, Shauna makes me laugh till I cry, and she does it pretty effortlessly. From day one, she’s just kind of instinctively known what my sense of humor is and is able to tap into it…and I think the reason she has such an easy time with that is because it pretty seamlessly matches up with her own sense of humor. Never does this particular connection between us come in more handy than when we’re at work, a place neither of us really want to be and which can sometimes put us both in a crappy mood. Just the other night we were at work, and for some reason we began talking about cooking apple pies in the fryer. Shauna escalated the absurdity of the conversation a little, and then I did, and then she did again, and soon were talking about dumping a whole box of apple pies in the fryer and then fishing them out with the baskets. In that moment the zaniness of it all made me laugh uncontrollably, until tears were streaming down my face. And it occured to me that I was getting paid to stand there and laugh myself silly. Which I found myself very ok with.

Recently we were sitting in our bedroom when my youngest daughter Willow wandered in. She was wearing leggings, and the tag on the back was annoying her; she wanted to know if I would cut the tag off. A lot of times, you can just yank those tags off without the need for scissors or anything; they’re designed to just be ripped off. So I grabbed the tag and attempted to dispose of it once and for all. Unfortunately, it was attached a bit more securely than I had given it credit for, and, rather than ripping the tag off, I lifted Willow completely off the ground, giving her an ultrawedgie in the process. The tag finally came off, but brought a giant chunk of the fabric from the butt of her leggings with it. As I sat there in bed holding the tag with the lonely piece of fabric attached to it, and looking at the gaping hole in the butt of the leggings (big enough for Willows entire butt to fit through), I could have been annoyed that I had just ruined a perfectly good article of clothing. But Shauna was laughing hysterically, as was Willow, and at that point, what could I do? I laughed, gentle reader…I laughed. And that’s all I’m saying.